Where circumstances allow it, not an hour in the day passes without something being brought in to be eaten. “This is an alligator pear—must be eaten with salt and pepper.” Now it is honey, pine-apple, mango, orange, banana, and even a joint of sugar-cane—anything to be eating. You are then expected to eat as hearty a dinner as ought to satisfy a man for a week. Ride a mile and a half and you are asked if you are not hungry. You reply, “No, indeed.” Cross the next stream, and “Are you not thirsty?” is asked. Say “No, indeed” again if you like, and you will be very lucky not to hear your admirable self inelegantly compared to some kind of a goat.
The climate of these mountains seems to be that of perpetual spring, 88° Fahrenheit being the warmest day we have had so far. I understand, however, that in September the heat is much more oppressive because there are more calms, but never so intolerable as in the changeable latitudes. Sunstroke! You might venture the reputation of half a dozen “speakers” (a trade which is had in the States for the picking of it up) that such a thing as sunstroke would not be felt here until the world has wheeled as many years backward as it has forward.
We are trotting along on the way to Porto Cabello. I have given you a description of these valleys before, but passing a grove of rose-apples just now, (a fruit highly prized in the West Indies simply for its flavor, the tree being much like that of a lime, and the fruit hollow, something like a May-apple, lustrous as an orange, and flavored precisely as a rose is perfumed,) I could but reflect that if another Eve were to be placed in an earthly garden I should pray that it might be somewhere among the hills of New England, for, doubtless, then she would meet temptation with a masterly resistance; but if placed in such a garden as might be made in this country,—with all the sins of the world before her I fear she would be tempted over again a thousand times.
Stop a moment on an elevated point of a homestead called “Crebehunda;” behold the grand valleys stretching away between the mountain chains until lost in the green-blue sea which the glass shows in the distance. Dodging under branches, going sometimes head-first through the eternal verdure which, if possible, grows even more luxuriant, in this way we ultimately reach Porto Cabello, a place which proves to be, as previously understood, the grandest point for a port of entry on the whole northern coast of the island.
These old Spaniards are all the time saying to me,
“My son, you never look pert.”
“Perfectly happy, uncle,” I reply.
“Look long time away—studying.”
“Nothing, uncle—only an American.”
“Only an American? Well, what do they different from other people?”